The late visionary rocker David Bowie with wife Iman. (Getty Wire Photo by Ron Galella)

Dance is a political strategy that says “yes” to life as opposed to the corporate and terroristic manipulations that so eagerly promote polarization and glorify violent entries into death. Simply put, that is one important reason David Bowie’s 1983 Let’s Dance video (directed by David Mallet) is one of my all-time favorites. Through its subtle acknowledgment of the plight of Aboriginals in Australia, the late great Bowie Jan 8, 1947 - Jan 10, 2016) made two very important statements:

The firststatement is very similar to that made by Leonardo DiCaprio when accepting a 2016 Golden Globe Award for his performance in the movie Revenant. It is namely this: the lives of indigenous and “minority” people are something much more than hindrances to a given company’s or government’s preferred agenda. As such, colonizing them (something which can be done in many different ways: economically, politically, socially, etc) or marginalizing the same is not the “acceptable option” so many seem to believe it is.

Put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Let's dance
Dance to the song they're playing on the radio

Let's sway
While colour lights up your face

Let's sway
Sway through the crowd to an empty space…
--David Bowie

The secondstatement made through the video is that as tragically depressing as social injustice and its accompanying agonies can be they do not have to frame or define every moment of one’s existence. The physical and creative energies of dance can relieve the paralyzing tensions caused by systemic drudgery and replace it with a healing sense of inspired positive motivation.

David Bowie on 1983 set of LET’S DANCE video with dancers Terry Roberts (left) and Joelene King (center). (Photo from bowiedownunder-dot-com originally published in 1983 Serious Moonlight Tour booklet)

To “put on your red shoes and dance the blues,” as Bowie suggests so compellingly, is one way of transforming sorrow into a temporary state of something close to bliss, and of reshaping subjugation into an exercise in transcendent advocacy. It is a bit of folk wisdom that people of African descent applied to superlative effect during the days of legal slavery in America.

Dancing Away the Blues

At the beginning of Let’s Dance, a young Aboriginal woman (Joelene King) steps into a beautiful pair of red shoes as her friends look on approvingly. Toward the video’s end, the shoes come to symbolize forces of oppression which threaten her native way of life as well humanity in general. So she takes them off and with her companion stomps on them and rejects what they now represent. The young woman and man (Terry Roberts) are last seen dancing atop a green shrub-covered cliff as images fade into gray contrasts between them, the city of Sydney, and open land.

Almost Like Russian Social Realism

Bowie himself stated his intentions in regard to the Let’s Dance video more bluntly. Speaking of both it and the video for China Girl, he pointed out the following in an interview with Kurt Loder for Rolling Stone Magazine:

"They're almost like Russian social realism, very naive. And the message that they have is very simple - it's wrong to be racist! ...I see no reason to f*ck about with that message, you see? I thought, 'Let's try to use the video format as a platform for some kind of social observation, and not just waste it on trotting out and trying to enhance the public image of the singer involved. I mean, these are little movies, and some movies can have a point, so why not try to make some point.” (David Bowie: Straight Time)

Compassion and Mindfulness

What may be most important in the scenarios described above (as well as on either side of contemporary political fences) is the ability to choose one’s response to a given dilemma. That is why in addition to proposing the previously-noted declarations the video also poses a number of provocative questions. For example, how well do we understand the meanings behind the music to which we are dancing and singing along? Is our passion vowing allegiance to mechanisms dedicated to our destruction or is it supporting the kind of values––such as compassion and mindfulness––likely to support sociopolitical environments designed to sustain the integrity of humanity’s naturally rich diversity?

David Bowie created socially conscious performance art that made us consider distinctions relevant to exercising sanity in a world which too often appears hopelessly lost to insanity. Given such a reason and many more, just as the man himself so often did his musical artistry will continue to take on new forms and ever deeper more meaningful significance. May his soul forever rest in music.

S14 Painting copyright by Tomas Alen Kopera with animation by George RedHawk

Astonished might be the best word to describe my response to the extraordinary gif featuring the reportedly blind Native American George RedHawk’s amazing animation of Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera’s 2014 oil on canvas titled “S14.” That it had been posted by the TedX Colombo chapter along with the following quote from The River of Winged Dreams doubled the intensity of my surprise:

The image of the flame-breathing eagle (or possibly hawk?) atop the head of a man appeared to me like an angel of the more fiercely hybrid variety described in traditional texts of the King James Bible. I was struck by the parallel that the TedX Colombo group drew between it and the quote. And then the sense it made not only became very clear but reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s famous lines:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all …”
( Emily Dickinson )

Hope in this New Year 2016, after the carnage and heartbreaks that have dogged humanity since 9/11, cannot make a difference in the form of nothing more than passive contemplation. It has to exercise strength in the manner described by Charter for Compassion as compassionate action. But before anything else can be employed to make a meaningful difference, hope itself has to remain intact within the hearts and souls of individuals.

The word hope (or a form of it) appears some 29 times in The River of Winged Dreams and 39 times in Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry. On this first day of the year 2016 I find myself invoking the word not so much for myself––though there are many reasons I probably should––as for all those who may have reached a point where they feel there is no such thing as hope. Or if there is, that it is meaningless in the face of calamities currently overrunning humanity. Those who believe that to be the case are at liberty to give it meaning of significant applicable substance.

Consider, for example, the millions of refugees whose determination has gone beyond redefining their individual lives to changing the course of history itself. Think of the wrongly-imprisoned men and women whose faith saw them through years of agonizing injustice and whose examples of forgiveness inspire so many others. Witness those whose struggle to breathe the toxic air of outrageously polluted cities have turned their desperation into rallying cries for nations to take definitive action to correct the extreme destructiveness of climate change.

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The short excerpt below is from the introductory essay “Deliverance in Action” which was first published in The Bridge of Silver Wings poetry collection and later included as part of The River of Winged Dreams. It is shared at this time with the hope that humanity in 2016 can reverse the deadly trends of the past and create new life-sustaining legacies truly worth celebrating:

The truth is we do not always know how we go from falling off the edge of one cliff to running with determination beside the ledge of another. The Bridge of Silver Wings is what I’ve come to call the unknowable unquantifiable process of deliverance in action.

It is what saves a given soul when that soul no longer has any idea how to save itself. It may be described as Creator, divinity, the angelic, love, good fortune, dharma, grace, faith, or any number of ways that provide hints but no irrefutably definitive explanation. It arrives when there’s no logical reason to believe it shall and provides not only a sense of salvation but one of transformation. Whereas the conditions of a specific life may not undergo any kind of miraculous change, the manner in which a person perceives and addresses those issues do. With a revised awareness of what is required to bring balance, healing, hope, and prosperity back into one’s life, a person is often able to achieve exactly that.

The journey across The Bridge of Silver Wings can be extremely frightening. At the same time, it can be filled with the kind of joyful revelations and thrilling affirmations of one’s self and destiny that are experienced only when one dares to take it.
(from The River of Winged Dreams)

Is the happiness that everyone wishes each other at the beginning of a New Year possible? It certainly would not seem to be for the millions around the world who find their very existence threatened by potential immediate deletion with every second that passes. The good news on this day and every day of the year is that those conditions do not have to remain the same.

After learning about the amazing works of the late sculptor Marie Uchytilová (1924-1989), especially her masterpiece “The Memorial to the Children of Lidice," it became easy to see why a growing number of people are inspired by her. Yet she should be much better known and more celebrated than she is at this time.

Is the lack of recognition of her powerful creative contributions to humanity because of her gender, or due to her national origin of Czechoslovakia? Or might it be because humanity is still committing in so many different ways the atrocity she documented through her great historical work? Whatever the reason may be, the overwhelming evidence of the artist’s singular accomplishment speaks for itself. The minimal credit allotted her implies a case of guerrilla decontextualization by omission.

The “Memorial to the Children of Lidice” is also sometimes referred to as the “Memorial to Children Victims of War.” On days such as the United Nations’ Human Rights Day, or Day to End Racism, or World Peace Day, it can be difficult to think of such children. They’re the ones who never lived long enough to fight for their rights. They never got to present humanity with whatever unique gifts of creative vision, persuasive leadership, social influence, or scientific aptitude they may have possessed.

What can be most difficult, when thinking of them, is that we have made such little progress since the horrendous massacre (part of an act of retaliation ordered by Adolph Hitler) that occurred on June 10, 1942, in the Czech Republic village of Lidice, not so very far northwest of Prague. That massacre which “The Memorial to the Children of Lidice" documents so hauntingly.

Intensified Brilliance

One of the great miracles of those who sacrifice everything––as Marie Uchytilová did––for the sake of creating an enduring masterwork of consciousness-raising art is that their voices always manage to reach hearts eager to hear what they have to say. What Uchytilová’s voice had to say to this author’s heart inspired the creation of the quotation artwork posted with this essay.

Someone might very well rummage through hidden details of her life and come up with reasons to challenge my assertion that the gifted sculptress deserves greater acknowledgement than has been granted. I would, then, still have to contend that while one might choose to dismiss her, it is hardly possible to imagine ignoring the intensified brilliance of the souls of 82 children emanating from the bronze splendor of her tribute to them.

"This fire that we call loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls." Aberjhani (from ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love. Poster art by FamilyShare.com)

You can enjoy part 1 of this article by clicking here. Part 2 begins now:

Impressive 21st-century technological advances notwithstanding, we have no reasons at present believe our modern global version of the Tower of Babel is about to crumble and then reconstruct itself any time soon. Terrorists, warlords, and state governments alike would do best to include within their strategic plans sufficient measures of sanity beyond the impulses to attempt to coerce each other into unlikely forms of submission.

Different values and worldviews do not have to mean inevitable violence or conflict. They can mean greater enrichment of each other’s lives. Leadership theorist Max De Pree wrote as truthfully as anyone has when he stated:

“We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and inclusion” (Leadership is an Art).

That holds true in modern times whether you propose to be a leader of young malleable individuals eager to become catalysts for positive change or of more established groups dedicated to securing a specific legacy. What matters, above all else, is that everybody matters.

Diversity is an aspect of human existence that cannot be eradicated by terrorism or war or self-consuming hatred. It can only be conquered by recognizing and claiming the wealth of values it represents for all. The situation would be quite different if the violent extremism which has come to characterize anarchistic terrorism and government-sanctioned warfare actually resolved anything. The problem is they do not. Advances are claimed on one front and then annihilation––physical, mental, and spiritual–– witnessed on another. Global poverty, dis-empowering illiteracy, health crises, and human trafficking linger like the ultimate toxic nuclear radiation. The hearts of infants beat their last, blood dries on abandoned corpses, and souls take their leave of now useless broken bones.

Of Love and Bridges

The 13th-century Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose poetry in Persian has been translated into superb English versions by the 21st-century American poet Coleman Barks, told us that “Love is the bridge between you and everything.” Those are marvelous words to contemplate when struggling to make sense of the avoidable carnage in Paris, Syria, Nigeria, Mali, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Equally marvelous to contemplate is the confluence of sensibilities that has bypassed time, space, and nationality to make Barks’ name virtually synonymous with that of Rumi’s.

Paris in particular is known in part for its many bridges and is legendary as a place that evokes mesmerizing creative expressions of love, in both the greatest of artists and the most ordinary men and women. However, if the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the likelihood that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences common to all human beings. What civilization does not contain within its histories tales of sons, daughters, husbands, and wives who have been lost to conflict, and whose deaths left gaping voids that could be filled with nothing but grief? In what land do people not hope that the coming New Year will bring with it fewer reasons to bow before fear or despair and greater inspiration applied to an empowered sense of hope and dignity? The more healing options do not have to be dragged into a disposal bin designed for unrealistic dreams and desires.

A Messy and Complicated Concept

The four letters that spell out the word “love”––or five (amour) in French, seven (Кохання) in Ukrainian, or six (upendo) in Swahili–– can indeed add up to a messy and complicated concept. Nevertheless, whatever danger it (love, amour, Кохання, upendo) might pose to human existence is far less fatal than strapping bombs next to one’s heart as if they were newly-earned wings. Nor is it more lethally addictive than the apparent rush that comes from investing billions in war machines and prisons instead of committing the same to much-needed medical research and education programs.

These children are eating in poverty-stricken Mali, Africa, where terrorists killed 19 people at a hotel just one week following attacks in Paris, France. (photo from UN Word Food Bank Organization and Daouda Guirou 06-2014)

Consider that pain and bewilderment at some point in the course of individual lives knocks people sobbing to their wretched knees no matter where those lives may have originated. Consider that universal agonies, common challenges, and simple human dignity make each of us worthy of some degree of compassion.

Imagine that the strength and resources which may be claimed through communication and reconciliation are far greater and much more sustainable than any likely to come from ignoring everything that binds the fate of one to that of another. The acknowledgement of a single possibility can change everything. It can heal a wounded city like Paris or restore humankind’s faith in what is best within us all.